As you can see it clearly can see the USB device, but when it opens the device it fails. And yes I’ve tried Administrator. And for the hell of it, I fire up Windows XP on VMWare, connect the USB dongal, and amazingly:

So first thing is to build GCC 2… I couldn’t find any of the Linux patches for 2.0, 2.1 or 2.2.. I only tried to build 2.0 from source as targeting a.out i386 but it looks like the 2.0 files on the FSF’s site are missing files?

Anyways GCC 2.3.3 actually includes builtin support of Linux! I was able to build most of it, but just like GCC 2.5.8 for OS/2 EMX, But this time I used the gcc driver from GCC 2.6.3, which added support for Windows NT 3.5 native builds, and I now had my GCC cross compiler!

Thankfully the prior binutils and assembler I was using in my GCC 1.40 cross compiler, still cooperated just fine, and I could happily build and link just fine.

From there it was a matter of fighting the makefiles as for some reason as make calls other makefiles they are not passing variables, so I just cheated, and changed the paths, along with editing the dependencies to finding stuff in a more sane manner. Plus all the Makefiles have include paths hard coded into the build process as expected. After fighting for a while, it linked and even better, it runs!

Linux 0.96c-71 cross compiled from windows

So yeah, using the MCC hard disk image from oldlinux.org and it boots!

Cool stuff, indeed!

As an added bonus I was also able to get 0.97 & 0.98 to compile as well!

I tried the x86 version from Apple’s Darwin web site. For those who don’t know Darwin was (is?) an open source version of the OS X kernel and userland. This was on parity with the OS X 10.1 release. It was notoriously picky about hardware back in 2001, let alone anything today, and much to my amazement it installed fine on Qemu 2.7.

For anyone who wants to run this under newer versions of Windows as I know I can’t install it on Windows 8 or 10, I installed it on my Windows XP x64 machine, and uploaded it here as vc2003toolkit.7z

By the time this came out, Microsoft had started to admit that they had lost serious ground to GCC, as for years they had neglected the low end $99 market that they had dominated during their fights with Borland in the QuickC vs TurboC days. Once Borland had withdrawn from the market, Microsoft felt no need to compete and this left plenty of time for GNU tools to take hold in the marketplace. This was a stopgap reaction as a prelude to the Visual Studio Express that would happen in 2005 onward.

Elsewhere I’ve been able to find an old Windows 2003 SP1 Platform SDK image, it should certainly let this compiler build far more interesting things. Although unless you really need 2003, you really ought to look at newer stuff. Unless you like really old stuff, then as a reminder the Win32s 1.1 SDK includes the version 8.00 compiler from 1993 as well. You can download it from here: win32s-1.1-build-88-msvc32sdev.7z

While on the road, I stumbled onto a link that referred to this program called Exchange, which is a decapitated ‘port’ of CP/M that simply allows you to read and write CP/M disk images. While on the surface it may not seem much, but the fact it actually uses the 68000 kernel from CP/M seemed really interesting to me. With minor fighting I had it running on MinGW!